Dominican Dinner and Shopping

I have a friend coming to visit who spend some time living in the DR and is really excited at the prospect of getting some good dominican food and maybe doing some shopping for hard to find items (even if she doesn't end up buying a lot, just the novelty of seeing them all for sale here in the states will probably work).

I only moved here pretty recently, and we live in bk so don't have occasion to get very far uptown too often, but i know that some of our better options would involve a train ride up that way which we are totally not opposed to.

So, where would you send someone looking for one dominican meal (probably a dinner) where we could wander either before or after to see the best range of imported dominican items? Searching the board i realize there are a lot of lunch places in midtown that do dominican/cuban, but we are looking for something distinctly dominican, and probably dont want to deal with the crush of office drone lunchers.